[77F-EOC: p. 83]
“In isolation human power is limited, in combination it is infinite. The knowledge of a single man is limited, but reason, science, is unlimited, for it is a common act of mankind, and it is so, not only because innumerable men co-operate in the construction of science, but also in the more profound sense, that the scientific genius of a particular age comprehends in itself the thinking powers of the preceding age … .” [77F-EOC: p. 83]
[78F-EOC: p. 87]
“God is pure spirit, clear self-consciousness, moral personality; Nature, on the contrary, is, at least partially, confused, dark, desolate, immoral, or to say no more, unmoral. But it is self-contradictory that the impure should proceed from the pure, darkness from light. How then can we remove these obvious difficulties in the way of assigning a divine origin to Nature? Only by positing this impurity, this darkness in God, by distinguishing in God himself a principle of light and a principle of darkness. In other words, we can only explain the origin of darkness by renouncing the idea of origin, and presupposing darkness as existing from the beginning. But that which is dark in Nature is the irrational, the material, Nature strictly, as distinguished from intelligence. Hence the simple meaning of this doctrine is, that Nature, Matter, cannot be explained as a result of intelligence; on the contrary, it is the basis of intelligence, the basis of personality, without itself having any basis; spirit without Nature is an unreal abstraction; consciousness develops itself only out of Nature.” [78F-EOC: p. 87]
[79F-EOC: p. 98]
“The divine being is the pure subjectivity of man, freed from all else, from everything objective … - his most subjective, his inmost self.” [79F-EOC: p. 98]
[80F-EOC: p. 100]
“But into the idea of the personal God, the positive idea of whom is liberated, disembodied personality, released from the limiting force of Nature, to smuggle again this very Nature, is as perverse as if I were to mix Brunswick mum with the nectar of the gods, in order to give the ethereal beverage a solid foundation.” [80F-EOC: p. 100]
[81F-EOC: p. 101-102]
[P. 101] “The culminating point of the principle of subjectivity is creation out of nothing. (…)Creation out of nothing is the highest expression of omnipotence: but omnipotence is nothing else than subjectivity exempting itself from all objective conditions and [P. 102] limitations, and consecrating this exemption as the highest power and reality: nothing else than the ability to posit everything real as unreal – everything conceivable as possible: nothing else than the power of the imagination, or of the will as identical with the imagination, the power of self-will. (…) On this ground, creation out of nothing as a work of the Almighty Will falls into the same
